The Nice and the Good

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

About the Author

Also by Iris Murdoch

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

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Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919 of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, and then worked with UNRRA in London, Belgium and Austria. She held a studentship in Philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, and then in 1948 she returned to Oxford where she became a Fellow of St Anne’s College. Until her death in February 1999, she lived with her husband, the teacher and critic John Bayley, in Oxford. Awarded the CBE in 1976, Iris Murdoch was made a DBE in the 1987 New Year’s Honours List. In the 1997 PEN Awards she received the Gold Pen for Distinguished Service to Literature.

Since her writing debut in 1954 with
Under the Net
, Iris Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels, including the Booker Prize-winning
The Sea, The Sea
(1978). Other literary awards she received include the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
The Black Prince
(1973) and the Whitbread Prize for
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
(1974). Her works of philosophy include
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
(1992) and
Existentialists and Mystics
(1997). She has written several plays including
The Italian Girl
(with James Saunders) and
The Black Prince
, adapted from her novel of the same name.

In a little scene towards the beginning of
The Nice and the Good
a young adolescent boy makes a doomed gesture of love to a young adolescent girl:

Pierce had covered the table with a complicated pattern composed of hundreds of shells arranged in spirals, tiny ones in the centre, larger ones on the outside. Adjusting the outer edge of the pattern he stopped to select a shell from a heap at his feet.

It is a typically Murdochian moment. Brought up from the nearby beach, the shells invade the household, bringing the sea and the seashore with them and breaking down the normally discrete categories of earth and water, land and sea. Under the influence of love the otherwise warring elements yearn one for the other and the animals, vegetable, and mineral worlds fuse with the human in a sympathetic and almost animistic universe of pre-Baconian correspondences. ‘My imagination lives near the sea and under the sea’, wrote Iris Murdoch once
¹
, and in this as in other novels the sea sweeps in on an emotional tide that dissolves all rigid boundaries and in their place creates something rich and strange, an imaginative realm not unlike the ‘rich strand’ of literary romance. Whether in
Tristan and Iseult, The Faerie Queene
, or Shakespeare’s late romances, this tideland is a mysterious border-ground that owes allegiance both to land and sea – an ambiguous and ambiguating place where anything and everything might happen. Here things don’t go according to plan and the divisions or compartments which normally rationalise life give way to something quite different. It’s no accident, in fact, that much of the action of this novel takes place on the beach and in the sea-caves of the idyllic Dorset coast where the story is, for the most part, set.

Though small, light, and infinitely disposable, Pierce’s shells are more than just shells. The something-more – the excess that is to be carried over – is the great weight they bear, the whole burden of first (and in this case unrequited, love. For, and again this is one of Murdoch’s hallmarks, the physical world is never just the physical world. It is infused with metaphysical meaning, aglow with the extra dimension that is bestowed upon it by the artist’s loving gaze. No other writer except perhaps John Donne is so concerned to materialise feelings into things or to ram ordinary objects – shells, stones, pieces of glass – with metaphysical significance. Murdoch often wrote of this ‘thingy’ quality of the world. To see the world in all its concrete objectivity, its manifest over-there-ness, is a sign of proper attentiveness, of a patient and benevolent regard which, in its direction away from the self and out towards external phenomena, is akin to love. Even the contents of a rubbish bin can be lovingly described as if seen for the first time, the detritus of daily life attended to with a new, even startled eye. The kind of hyper-clarity that results makes us realise how rarely we apprehend reality in this way if, indeed, we ever apprehend it at all.

What makes this scene most characteristic of all, however, is the question it raises about art. For the shell design is, with its careful placements and overall eye to effect, nothing less than a work of art. Pierce’s spiral patterns imitate the Fibonacci spirals of the shells themselves, art and nature coinciding for once and testifying to God and man’s blessed rage for order in a universe that’s otherwise random and utterly prey to contingency. But the beauty does not last. For all its pained solemnity, Pierce’s gift is destined to go unheeded, unreceived. Intended as a welcome-home present for Barbara, home from finishing school for the summer holidays, the whole thing is, on her arrival, thoughtlessly, crushingly swept aside. Does its impermanence, its destructibility – the simple fact that it is refused – negate the gift, the labour of love? What is art’s place in a violent, uncaring world? Does it have a curative function? Is it there to make good an imperfect nature, to patch up, polish and finesse the raw material of experience, patiently restoring the rents in the fabric of life? Or does art make no difference whatsoever? Is it just another component of a world that is no more nor less contingent for its being there? Do terrible things happen regardless
of whether art is there or not? The existence of Shakespeare’s plays or Schubert’s music did not prevent the Holocaust, after all. Is art – or good art, in any case – an isolated monument, then, one that rises serenely above the chaotic field of human happening, its symbols capturing the cultural memory and with it a whole archaeology of meaning? There are times when, in her reverential attitude to the great classics of literature and of Renaissance painting, Murdoch seems to imply the latter. But there are also moments when art’s ability to hold, bind, and even redeem experience are savagely mocked – when elegant patterns and formal contrivances collapse into hideous scenes of complication and sexual muddle which this novelist has made her own special trademark. Is art pointless, then? And, if it is, does that negate art or only affirm it still further? Besides, where in all this does the novelist’s own art lie?

The intimate relation between ethics and art is the one issue with which all Iris Murdoch’s writing – her philosophy as well as her fiction – is ultimately concerned.
The Nice and the Good
is no exception and its question-begging title draws particular attention to the Socratic quest for the good man. ‘What is a good man like? How can we make ourselves morally better?
Can
we make ourselves morally better?’ These questions, formulated here in ‘“On God” and “Good”’, an essay published in 1969, a year after
The Nice and the Good
, centre in that novel around the character of John Ducane, a middle-aged civil servant who is perceived by those around him to be a model of the upright man. Ducane does not necessarily share his friends’ good faith in him but he sees goodness as a serious aim and ‘had from childhood quite explicitly set before himself the aim of becoming a good man’. This ambition takes the form of regular if not always happy self-examination. If morality is intimately linked with art, then Ducane’s ethics are best described as theatrical. He early relinquishes a career at the Bar out of a dislike for the histrionics of that trade, but Ducane’s practical ethics are, for all that, entirely modelled on the drama. In the puritan mentality of his strict Scottish upbringing he characteristically sees himself as performing if not before the eye of God then before a personalised conscience, and either coming up to scratch or (increasingly) not. He is acutely conscious of the way others perceive him – the figure he cuts in their eyes – and, given that everything revolves around seeing, he is almost more upset at
seeming to be a liar or a traitor that at actually being one. All this involves a no doubt laudable exercise of the imagination: the ability to imagine others’ views of oneself is co-extensive with the ability to imagine goodness, evil, or other people’s feelings, and is a prerequisite, of course, of the creative artist. There is a profound aestheticism in Ducane’s nature and when he attempts to perform good actions it is not surprising that the role to which he naturally reverts is that of the dramaturge. In his self-appointed role as
deus ex machina
he takes it upon himself to arrange two marriages (things happen in pairs in this novel), contriving, Prospero-like, to combine imagination with will in the control of otherwise recalcitrant human material. He is only half successful.